WiM011 - The Booth Series | Episode 1 | Inflation Opposes Innovation

Summary

The "What is Money?" Show — WiM011: The Booth Series | Episode 1 | Inflation Opposes Innovation

Host: Robert Breedlove
Guest: Jeff Booth (Author of "The Price of Tomorrow")
Date: April 20, 2021

---

Episode Overview

This inaugural episode of the Booth Series on "The What is Money? Show" features an extended conversation between host Robert Breedlove and entrepreneur/author Jeff Booth. The episode is structured around Booth’s book, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future. Together, Breedlove and Booth explore the tension between exponential technological innovation (which naturally lowers prices) and an outdated fiat monetary system (which requires perpetual inflation to survive). The discussion is rich, philosophical, and rooted in history and economics, challenging conventional thinking about money, productivity, government policy, and the future of human cooperation.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Technological Deflation vs. Monetary Inflation

[09:25–15:16]

• Booth sets the stage: two powerful, opposing forces shape today’s economy — technology, which wants to make things cheaper, and the legacy monetary system, which depends on rising prices.
  • “Technology wanting to make prices cheaper on an exponential scale. And a world we've lived in forever, that prices always went up...” — Jeff Booth [09:31]
• The inevitability of technological deflation is contrasted with central banking orthodoxy, which sees inflation as necessary.
  • Booth notes that while everyone accepts that technology brings productivity, the implications for price deflation are routinely avoided.

Notable Quote:

"Those productivity gains should drive deflation. And that's moving on an exponential scale. Not one person has argued that."
— Jeff Booth [09:57]

---

2. Paradigm Shifts Are Intellectually & Emotionally Difficult

[13:54–15:16]

• Declining jobs resulting from innovation scare people; it’s difficult to conceive of work being de-necessitated rather than lost.
• Fear causes people to retreat to the safety of the known system, even if it's unsafe.
  • "It's a paradigm shift. And it's really hard to understand paradigm shifts. So you retreat to safety, not knowing that it's not safe." — Jeff Booth [14:44]

Notable Quote:

“They think Bitcoin's unsafe and it's the safest asset there is. But it's not just Bitcoin. It's... you retreat to what you know.”
— Jeff Booth [14:44]

---

3. Why Central Banks Missed the Explosion of Tech Deflation

[16:43–21:32]

• Central banks’ failure was not just about missing China or demographic trends; they fundamentally underestimated the exponential pace of technological change.
• The analogy to Blockbuster vs. Netflix: established entities are routinely blind to paradigmatic shifts.
• Even if central bankers now saw the problem, they couldn’t allow a deflationary reset — their own insolvency is at stake.

Notable Quotes:

“So few people can [see the shift], and that's what creates creative destruction in businesses. It's logical that central banks would not see this.”
— Jeff Booth [18:31]

"If you let nature take course, which would be deflationary, you'd have a deflationary shock first... There'd be nothing there because there's nothing backing the debt."
— Jeff Booth [19:38]

---

4. Quantitative Easing and the Negative Feedback Loop

[22:34–29:33]

• The modern debt-based economy is in a "rat wheel"—printing more money lowers interest rates and inflates asset prices (which benefits asset holders and hurts workers), but any rise in rates would collapse the system.
• As more people realize holding cash is unsafe, they turn to assets like Bitcoin.
• All metrics (like GDP) are geared to a growth-based paradigm that no longer fits a deflationary tech-driven reality.

Notable Quote:

“As money leaves the system, interest rates in the existing system have to go up. But if interest rates go up, the entire system collapses.”
— Jeff Booth [25:48]

---

5. GDP, Productivity, and Broken Economic Measurements

[29:33–34:32]

• GDP and ‘growth’ are outdated concepts when tech offers exponential productivity at negligible cost.
• Free and digital goods (like Zoom calls or smartphone LIDAR) are not captured in GDP.

Notable Exchange:

“All of our models... if our models are built around a different world around growth, listen to any politician... 'We need more growth.' When we can logically say and prove it's moving the other way."
— Jeff Booth [31:43]

---

6. The Digital Age Erodes Borders & Protectionism

[34:49–37:40]

• Technologies like Zoom and AI not only increase productivity but erase geography—talent and capital move globally, subverting government efforts at protectionism.
  • "It vaporizes the borders. And by the way, bitcoin actually plays into that really well too." — Jeff Booth [37:10]

---

7. Systemic Decree vs. Economic Reality

[37:40–43:51]

• Government decree (inflation, debt, spending) collides with the reality of technology-driven abundance.
• Those most disadvantaged by inflation often lobby for policies (like MMT) that actually worsen inequality.

Notable Quote:

"You're desperate to feed your family and you'll listen to anybody that says, okay, I'll give you a $2,000 check. You'll vote for them without realizing they gave it to you by picking your other pocket."
— Jeff Booth [40:17]

---

8. Power Concentration and the Failure of Fiat Systems

[43:51–46:28]

• Any system that blocks technological deflation and requires inflation will inevitably centralize power and concentrate wealth.
• This leads to increasingly sharp wealth inequality and destabilizes societies.

Notable Quote:

"How does any system that blocks that benefit of technology... not concentrating all control?"
— Jeff Booth [45:17]

---

9. Debt Creation as Self-Annihilation

[46:28–49:44]

• Debt pulls future growth forward at the expense of future generations, leading to unsustainable debt service and systemic collapse.
• Every major nation is locked in this "arms race" of debt and geopolitical games, leading to currency wars, trade wars, and ultimately, real wars.

---

10. Weaponized Money, Plunder, and Geopolitical Instability

[49:44–54:57]

• Fiat currency is a tool of international plunder and conflict; information technology now exposes and erodes this mechanism.
• The ability to "fight over the rules" incentivizes constant conflict over monetary control.

Notable Quote:

“It’s an economic paradigm premised on plunder. We have to steal from someone or somewhere to try and paper over these other losses, and it just doesn't work."
— Robert Breedlove [49:51]

---

11. System Design vs. Bad Actors

[54:57–56:58]

• It’s not mainly the intentional actions of bad actors; system design and perverse incentives produce negative outcomes regardless of who’s in charge.
• Discussion of Munger’s law: “Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome.”

Notable Quotes:

"We can't look at who's sitting in the seat. We have to look at the seat. What is the seat? What levers are available to that particular command center?"
— Robert Breedlove [55:53]

---

12. Historical Patterns: War as the Final Reset

[56:58–61:25]

• Historical analysis: all major fiat currencies ultimately collapse, often after prolonged periods of war and exploitation to prolong their stability.
• Example: the British Empire's extraction of trillions from India and the gold/silver standard mismatch.

Notable Quote:

"The rules are always reset through war. And so if we think that that can't look through history, it always happens through war."
— Jeff Booth [59:36]

---

13. The Monopoly Analogy and Escaping the Rigged Game

[61:25–65:25]

• Monopoly’s rules reinforce early luck and lead to one winner; if you can never start a new game, losers are trapped.
• People will eventually abandon, revolt, or try to burn down the system—or seek a new, fairer game, like Bitcoin.

Notable Quote:

“They will burn down the world. They will burn the game board to the ground. That's where you get revolutions and wars. But they won't stay in the system.”
— Jeff Booth [64:31]

---

14. The Futility of ‘Taxing the Rich’ and the Illusion of Solutions

[65:25–68:45]

• Even 100% taxation of profits can't repair the existing debt hole; government continues to print, accelerating inequality and systemic risk.
• Manipulation of the “risk-free rate” falsifies all other prices.

Notable Quotes:

"There is no way out through taxes. There is no way the existing system [can escape]."
— Jeff Booth [66:18]

"When your risk free rate is being manipulated... you know it's going to be more and more manipulated, then every other economic calculation is manipulated too."
— Jeff Booth [68:25]

---

15. The Broken Work/Retirement Equation and Endemic Discontent

[69:13–71:10]

• People work ever-longer for ever-less, trying to outpace inflation eroding their savings; the treadmill only accelerates.

Notable Quote:

"We don't question. We don't even question why we do it at all in the first place."
— Jeff Booth [71:03]

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Extending and pretending is a great way to put it.”
  Robert’s summation of central banks’ attempt to keep the game going. [21:32]

• “The stability of rules is the bedrock of peace.”
  Robert on the explicit connection between rule-of-law in money and societal harmony. [61:18]

• On system design vs. individuals:

"Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."
Robert, paraphrasing Charlie Munger [55:53]

---

Important Timestamps & Segments

• 09:25 – Booth defines the unstoppable force of deflationary tech and its collision with entrenched inflationary mindsets.
• 25:48 – Booth explains the deflationary collapse risk and the system’s trap.
• 37:10 – Booth: Digital tech and bitcoin erase economic borders.
• 45:17 – Discussion on how inflation-centric systems centralize power.
• 61:26 – Monopoly analogy for current economic system.

---

Dynamic & Tone

• The hosts are philosophical, evidence-driven, and unafraid of challenging dogma.
• Jeff Booth radiates calm urgency, deeply empathic concern, and clarity of vision.
• Robert Breedlove frames issues historically and analytically, gently pressing on implications and edge cases.

---

Conclusion & Takeaways

• Exponential tech-driven deflation is natural and broadly beneficial, but legacy money systems can only survive through inflation — creating a fundamental, irreconcilable conflict.
• Fiat money, debt, and central planning cannot survive the accelerating productivity and transparency of the digital age.
• Faith in conventional economic measurements and state assurances is increasingly misplaced as system design flaws become manifest.
• Bitcoin and other decentralized protocols represent a paradigm shift in rule-stability that could enable peaceful, productive abundance — but transitioning will be socially and psychologically challenging.

---

This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, economics, and social change in the digital era.

Transcript

[Robert Breedlove]

Foreign.

[Narrator/Host Introduction (Robert Breedlove)]

Hey guys, this is Robert Breedlove from the what is Money? Show. And as you've learned by watching this show, Bitcoin is the single most important asset you can own in the 21st century. And one of the most important companies in Bitcoin today is NYDIG. NYDIG's mission is to facilitate financial security for all. They accomplish this by bringing a high level of professionalization and sophistication to the bitcoin marketplace. As a true game changer in the industry, NYDIG is safely unlocking the power of Bitcoin for forward thinking individuals and institutions alike. By using nydig, you will gain access to an end to end institutional grade platform providing Bitcoin OTC transactions, Bitcoin collateralized borrowing, secure custody, asset management, derivatives financing, market research and more. And all of these services meet the highest regulatory, governance and audit standards. Led by Robbie Gutman, Yin Zhao and Ross Stevens, NYDIG has absolutely exploded onto the Bitcoin scene recently and is leading the way for ongoing institutional adoption in

[Jeff Booth]

this nascent asset class.

[Narrator/Host Introduction (Robert Breedlove)]

So please be sure to check out NYDIG as a single source for all your Bitcoin needs. Hey guys, welcome back to the what is Money Show. I am your host Robert Breedlove and we are coming to you today with our second long form series, the Booth Series. Our guest today is Jeff Booth. He's a leading entrepreneur, a thought leader in the spheres of technology and economics, and he's the author of the Price of Tomorrow. Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future. Jeff's book goes through the case that basically technological deflation is an unstoppable force, so that human beings are innovating and solving problems, delivering the satisfaction of wants better, faster and cheaper, which causes prices to decrease naturally. But our entire current monetary paradigm and system is arrayed against that principle. So we have a system that's premised on continually increasing prices by artificially expanding the money supply, running into this economic reality of technological price deflation, which has become exponential in the digital age. And so in our conversation today, Jeff and I are going to run through his book, using it as kind of an outline to our conversation. But then we'll also veer off and get into a lot of nuance surrounding these many topics. Jeff is really highly intelligent, deeply empathic, super compassionate guy, and I think it really comes across in the way he articulates his views. His book too is just an excellent demonstration of the latitude he has in his thinking and that he understands a lot of different domains at A very deep level, but he's been able to synthesize them in a very understandable way at a high level and put together, you know, to assemble all of this understanding into one composite picture of where we are in. In kind of the macroeconomic journey of civilization and where technology is going to take us. So, similar to the Sailor series Jeff and I recorded for almost 12 hours, we covered an extremely broad spectrum of fascinating topics. And to just lay out where this. This conversation is going to go, I'm going to name the chapters in Jeff's book which are what guided our conversation, outline and provide a rough synopsis of where this conversation is headed. So, first chapter in Jeff's book is how the economy Works, parts one and two. Then we're going to go into why it is hard to think differently. We're then going to talk about the technology boom. We're going to talk about the future of energy, future of intelligence. Who will be the masters in this new economic paradigm we're moving into. We're going to get into some psychological principles underpinning a lot of this economic activity in the chapter called Us versus Them. Then we're going to get into can we Cooperate? Where this has a bit of a discussion about game theory and how that plays into economics. And finally, a call to action. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Jeff. It's super insightful. I think it will help reframe your worldview on fiat currency complex as it exists today, and how it is decreasingly relevant and even destructive as we move into the digital age. So with that, let's get into the Booth series, and I'll see you back here again soon.

[Robert Breedlove]

Jeff Booth, welcome to the what Is Money Show.

[Jeff Booth]

Thanks, Robert. It's gonna be this. I'm gonna. I think we were just saying offline. I think this is gonna be a lot of fun.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, I'm super excited about this. I really appreciate you agreeing to come on. You know, we are diving into, I think, a lot of the territory that's covered in your book called Deflation, Price of Tomorrow.

[Narrator/Host Introduction (Robert Breedlove)]

And I'll tell you what, the title,

[Robert Breedlove]

I'm sorry, did I say it backwards? It's the Price of Tomorrow.

[Jeff Booth]

Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant Future.

[Robert Breedlove]

Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant future. I actually think your title is a little deceiving, because I thought I expected to read this book about economics and things that I already more or less know, I've read a lot about, but it actually goes really deep into technology. And I tweeted this out To a group or telegram this out to a group recently that I was looking for a book that went into the implications of digital technology. And I think your book did an amazing job of that. Just really looks at all the new. The frontiers of innovation, I guess, and how it might change the way we organize ourselves in the world.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, I really, I appreciate that. And from my. The book. And we're gonna explore some of those things a lot deeper in the series, which is gonna be exciting to do. Cause in the book, to be able to pull this together, when you think about the structural change that society is going through, I had to handle the Tops of the Waves and put it together in a narrative that people could see what was going on. Because you had all these individual camps, utopian and technology, you had the monetary theorists and nobody was being able to. What I felt is people were missing the most important point. And so. But tying the Tops of the Waves together, you sacrifice depth on some of those issues. Right. And you also sacrifice. So I wrote it and I've been asked so often, are you going to write another book? And my answer is, I never wanted to write this book, so probably not. And why I do these things like this is. This is free. I can pass on this information to a whole bunch of people. Other people are building on all of this information and different things. And so I don't need to write a book to be able to do that. I'm not saying never. But what the beautiful thing about your series and this is going to do is it's going to allow us to explore where the book ended and what that means going forward. And I think we could go into. And I think that's going to be a fun conversation.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, agree completely. I love the analogy of the crust of the waves. And what we're going to do here is go a little bit deeper beneath the surface and see what's generating these big patterns at a deeper level. And I know you're a very philosophical guy. Really admire your thinking. You're definitely pushing the envelope, I think, on the global consciousness of this. This whole game we've been playing. And with that, maybe we could just jump in. I mean, your book starts out with how the economy works. So it lays out a very, I would say, simplistic but robust framework for what the economy actually is. And you start with this story of. I think it was a friend of yours you had dinner with, maybe. Yeah, his parents perhaps were the ones that said first currency wars, then trade wars, then real wars. And how. Where are we in that right now. I mean, what's going on with the economy today? And I guess, what do you see? How do you see technology changing its horizons going forward?

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. And I think if we started off on the very top of this and leading to that question is the vast change, these two big forces that are competing in our lives today that we don't talk about is technology wanting to make prices cheaper on an exponential scale. And a world we've lived in forever, that prices always went up and we've been indoctrinated into, they should always go up. And we believe, we've sit in a system that we believe the only way the system works is that prices go up. And inflation is a good thing and people teach it, we believe it and everything else. And even if you believed inflation was a good thing, it's actually impossible to square that. Put that square round hole that technology is making things cheaper. And so if you just follow that logic, and that's why when you look at kind of all the reviews of the book and everything else, nobody, not one person has argued with me on the key tenet the technology should drive productivity gains. Those productivity gains should drive deflation. And that's moving on an exponential scale. Not one person has argued that. And so if you take that as. And that is so to me, that was my thesis and I looked for evidence everywhere. And I, and I put the evidence, we'll go through some of the evidence in the book, but you can see it all around us. And people can't, or most people aren't noticing it because they're measuring the system from an inflationary world that they've always lived in. And so those two forces are colliding against each other. People aren't talking about the key thing that could drive abundance. Technology could drive abundance. If we organized our world differently and we cling to a system that we've always known. And so the derivative of clinging to that system changes capitalism changes free markets, changes everything. And you concentrate power in this state. And so that currency wars to trade wars to real wars is essentially that. So essentially what governments are doing right now is making their labor cheaper so they can keep more jobs while technology is taking them. So driving inflation, the opposite side of driving inflation is wage deflation. It's the same coin. So your savings are going down, your wages are going down in real terms so that you can keep on a treadmill of more and more jobs. So you have these systems colliding. And all the measurements of the old system are irrelevant in today's world. And we can either face that fact and. And start to move to be able to change it or ignore it at our peril. And so kind of the whole context of the book, the whole reason I'd say I was forced to write it is because I was frustrated. My kids are going to grow up in a world that's going to look very unlike the world I grew up in. And they have the opportunities because it's going to burn down and turn into wars everywhere because of clinging to a system and nobody's going to see it. That's why I wrote the book.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's incredible. And I think, again, it's a really good book. And I like how to the point it was across so many aspects of the problem because it is a multivariate problem. And you really hit on all of them. You go through tech and game theory, et cetera. And it's almost as if, I mean, the analogy that comes to mind is like almost heliocentrism or something. We just discovered the sun is the middle of the solar system because innovation is unstoppable. Right. That's what we do as humans. We trade, we get smarter, we increase our productivity. And the reflection of that in the marketplace is declining prices

[Jeff Booth]

and declining jobs. Or it should be.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right, right, right.

[Jeff Booth]

Because we use technology to free our time.

[Robert Breedlove]

Absolutely. And this, I was just gonna say sounds declining jobs, sounds bad to most people, like in the modern age, but it actually means declining necessity of work. Almost. Right.

[Jeff Booth]

That. That point. So when. When we say some of these things. Because it'll trigger a response in people's minds of fear.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[Jeff Booth]

That they're not used to. And they won't investigate what we're saying because of the fear. So. And so you see this on Twitter all the time. You see this. And it's really. Because this is such a foreign concept to me, I don't know how it would work. So I'm scared of it. So I'm going to put my head back in this end.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's right.

[Jeff Booth]

That's what's happening.

[Robert Breedlove]

It's a testament.

[Jeff Booth]

And that's exactly. It's a paradigm shift. And it's really hard to understand paradigm shifts. So you retreat to safety, not knowing that it's not safe. That's a really big concept that applies to people retreating to the monetary standard today. They think Bitcoin's unsafe and it's the safest asset there is. But it's not just bitcoin. It's. You retreat to what you know, that's Right, Absolutely.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. The other question that comes up that I think is it's related and fear laden. Similarly, fear laden is, you know, what about our jobs? Question is the what would governments do if there were a crisis like Covid and we're on a Bitcoin standard? They couldn't send stimulus checks. People actually think that the government is more aptly rectifying the problems that Covid caused by sending stimulus checks than the free market rec be able to. So people, it's like almost people have never seen the world like that, which rightfully so. We've never had true free market in money. We've had close approximations, but not really a full free market like Bitcoin promises to be. And yeah, it's just hard for people to see and understand it. But clearly central banks haven't accepted this truth yet. I mean, they're fighting it tooth and nail with everything they've got. And you know, your book goes into kind of Bernanke's sequence of ineptitude where he's saying one thing after another that markets are fine, and then he's constantly one step behind or constantly behind the eight ball, whatever analogy you want to use. And it's just, it's kind of a shell game. It seems like that they're trying to change the data, change the narrative just to keep the inflationary scheme going, but they're fighting an unstoppable force of innovation.

[Jeff Booth]

So you just nailed that is what happened. And a lot of people read in the book, what I wrote about Bernanke is kind of poking, throwing stones and everything else. And you see this all the time, people screaming into the wind at the system change and why can't they see it? And I used a bunch of examples in this, and we will now too. But it's normal for people not to see technology changing at the rate it's changing. It's a normal course. So few people can. And that's what creates creative destruction in businesses. And so all that's happening is a normal course. Of all the central bankers that they missed how fast technology was moving 20 years ago. And the byproduct is a rise in debt and lower interest rates out of that to try to grow against it, which has taken more and more on an exponential scale to try to offset the price declines from technology. If you just now go into that chain of events that Bernanke and others were saying at that time, it would be logical if they didn't understand how fast technology was moving. Economists talk about demographics, they talk about China's impact on deflation. They talk about a whole bunch of other things and those things were all true, are all true. But they've been eclipsed by so much that the rate of technology. So if you thought about technology and how much it impacts what we're talking about, the deflation or that efficiency that drives deflation, it's moved from maybe 10th place over the last 10 years to so far and away first place about the amount of impact. But people still, because they're looking at historical models. Trying to put these historical models into perspective is something they don't understand. They don't have a clue. They're not technologists how fast this is happening. So it's logical. Just like Blockbuster didn't see Netflix, it's logical Kodak invented the digital camera but didn't capitalize on how could I change my business model to do it. It's logical that central banks would not see this. Right. And then let's even go further. What if they did? What if they know right now what I know?

[Robert Breedlove]

Right?

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. What if they said so? I agree with Jeff's thesis. I agree that everything is happening at a rate of technology now. You're putting the central bank, you have all power to do what you. What do you do?

[Robert Breedlove]

The biggest debtor in the world, which is the government, Right?

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah. If you let this is. If you let nature take course, which would be deflationary, you'd have a deflationary shock first. It wouldn't be the normal rate of technology moving through the market. It would reset all prices. And that reset of all prices would unwind everything all the way to the ground. There'd be nothing there because there's nothing backing the debt.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

So we just keep on unwinding. And every single institution on top of that would unwind as well, including the governments. So if you understand through that lens, potentially you have empathy for what they're dealing with. They missed it. You have a bunch of people that missed it and essentially thought you could centrally plan an economy or for whatever reason. Game theory. I could get more control over a different nation state by consolidating against oil and using that or with petrodollar or gold before they were moving off the gold standard. You get nation states having more power. And a lot of that, if you're living in that nation state was actually beneficial, of course. So it was beneficial to our lives growing up. We grew up in relative safety and everything else. If you didn't have access and if you were in a different country without that power it was detrimental, yes, and. But we've run out of games to play and there's a reckoning coming because you keep on extending and pretending for too long and people start asking questions based on this.

[Robert Breedlove]

Extending and pretending is a great way to put it. And what it seems to be happening is that central banks are premising their approach to markets on these linear models that you're describing. Right. We are existing in a period of distinctly non linear change. All these changes are exponential. Right. Blockbuster is the dominant player. One day, 10 years later, it's gone. We could just go through all of the, which we will go through all the industries that digital has impacted in this way.

[Narrator/Host Introduction (Robert Breedlove)]

And it's as if central banks, I

[Robert Breedlove]

guess by virtue of their traditionally held legal privilege or their legal monopoly, they think they're maybe untouchable from this or they don't. They just, I guess it's difficult, difficult to comprehend that everything you've been doing, there's so much inertia built into your business model like this is how we operate that you can't see this exponential change coming out of left field that really literally pulls the rug out from under you, so to speak.

[Jeff Booth]

So I'm going to use an example and when I say empathy and how systems operate, I'm going to use an example in my own business. It was three different businesses on the way through on the last one, $120 million kind of almost doubling in sales every year, growing really fast and realizing you needed a system change, a totally different way of doing business that changes what every single employee is doing once you get to the other side. And so you hire new employees and you build the tech platform that's going to do that and everybody's on side and you're doing this. But I misunderstood the, and I misunderstood how changing a structure once it's in place, how hard that is and changing mindsets. And then when I realized, okay, everybody's on site, they totally understand why we're doing this and it's right. But then they have to go back to their desk and do the old business. And so if you, if you think about that concept today and you think about everybody in the. So you could agree with my thesis, you could, you could say, yes, this is what's happening. And then you go back into live in your own world and your groceries just doubled in price or your rent went up and everything else and you're forced to okay, what do I do about it? And if you're on top of that, if you're now your Central bank, what do you do about it? It's too late. There is today over $130 trillion of negative real interest yielding debt. And with nothing backing, $130 trillion. And when you understand how big a number that is. So if you paid back a dollar a second for a trillion dollars, it would take 32,700 years. So the money can never be paid back. And it forces you down this question, which you know really well, what is money in the first place? So there is no money there. It's debt that's there and people believe and it's really an illusion, but they believe that it's safe to put your money in negative, that on your best day you're going to lose money. On your best day I'm going to put my in the safety. What I think is the safest asset, cash or treasury bills. And the best I could do is lose my money or lose some of my money. And we know it's going to be far worse than the best. When you think about that unwinding and you think about Bitcoin and if you think about the asymmetric bet, people have misjudged safety. So they think the existing is safe when that has the most risk today. And as more and more people start to understand that the money leaves the system, but as it leaves the system, interest rates in the existing system have to go up. But if interest rates go up, the entire system collapses. We're right back to where we started and it keeps on unwinding all the way to the ground. So interest rates can't go up. So you know that you're going to play this game back and forth with central banks that pretend that they're going to let interest rates go up, but they can't. And then they're going to do quantitative easing at a rate that people have no idea, right? So they're talking about today's rate, not knowing what's coming. And the amount is going to blow people's minds. Because as money leaves a system, they have to do way more to be able to suppress rates.

[Robert Breedlove]

So what you're saying is that the system has trapped itself in a negative feedback loop. Essentially where governments have been, I guess historically poor allocators of capital. Now those bills are effectively coming due. They've been papering over them by producing lowering interest rates, producing new debt, et cetera, et cetera. But we've now hit the zero boundaries, right? And we've actually penetrated zero bound in real rates. So that quiver of arrows, I guess has sort of been depleted and now it's where do we go from here? So now we see even more exotic methods being talked about. And again, I like the analogy. There was a. I forget what fiat economist yesterday tweeted out. You know, bitcoin would never be anything because it's too volatile and it's not legally accepted. There was another one that was one of the silliest things I'd ever heard. He said the only way bitcoin would succeed is if we bitcoiners put together a private currency board and backed bitcoin with the US dollar. I don't even know what that means. That's like the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard in my life. But this. And the meme I responded with was the old man yelling at the cloud. Which sounds silly, but it is. They're fighting nature. You're yelling at nature and saying please stop doing this. And you almost had to put bitcoin in that category. Whereas there's this thing out there now. It's an alternative to this mess. No one can change it. Just like no one can decree the weather to be any different. No one can change 21 million. And that is the new paradigm. It's a monetary system with rules that are clear that can't be changed. And it's one that I guess supports this nonlinear or exponential change of technology because all of a sudden hard money standard that is increasing in purchasing power. So the as the economy becomes more productive, if you just assume we're on a bitcoin standard, that money is becoming more valuable, people are more incentivized to save, which means there's more investment. So it's flipping this negative feedback loop we're stuck into into a virtuous loop, if you will. And I guess that sort of in a roundabout way brings me to my question is like our. I think we've established somewhat that the current system is broken. The next question would be is I guess the metrics are broken as well. So is GDP the right thing to be managing to. If you look at like I'm rereading human action now and Mises says the whole name of the game is to increase capital stock per person. We need more stuff per person. That's what decreases cost of living, makes us more productive. So is there something else we should be managing our economies to or is managing our economy is just a non secretory. It's a silly thing to even tell.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, no it's not. So managing our economies might be a non segregator but again that being said, there are some things to figure out on bitcoin on how do you transition, how do you pay for roads, how do you pay for services that we

[Robert Breedlove]

want

[Jeff Booth]

in safety and everything else. I know some people in bitcoin are saying the citadels and here I'm going to. There is no place safe enough if the world is left out of this transition it is so that that becomes so so and actually I would say that scares more people away from what this, what this could look like. So I think there is there, there has to be some real thoughtful transition but managing it I am totally with you. So. So we need to thought and I'd love to dig into some of that ideas on potential on the transition through this. But back to your question. Let's go first level. A lot of people today think it's the debt that is the problem. If you read Dalio and everything else and you have a super cycle of debt and they think and he believes a beautiful deleveraging and everything else because we've seen that before, there has been times before when that's happening and, and that is in the world we're moving into with technology moving as fast as it's moving. It's ridiculous to think that the cause of the debt, the rise in the debt was trying to stop technology from doing its job and lowering prices. It's a response and that response has to so the response because technology is still continuing to drive lower and lower costs and greater efficiency. That response and it's exponential. Most of the deflation is in front of us. So most of the response, I would say the response to be able to stop it has just started. So now we're there. So now take the next step to your question. Gdp. Yes. All of our models, if our models are built around a different world around growth, listen to any politician, listen to anybody. We need more growth. We need more growth. We need more growth. We need more jobs. We need more jobs. When we can logically say and prove it's moving the other way. If I'm wrong, if I'm wrong technology isn't efficiency and exponentially efficient, then we can still pretend we live in the old world, but there is no way we're going to grow out of this. We should be looking at growth in a different mindset. So instead of growth we should be celebrating the lowering prices because it means the growth is actually essentially declining prices and growing means freeing our time. It's not growth for the sake of growth. And I'm going to distort my currency to get more growth or lower my labor rate to get more growth by distorting my currency. And that's the people thing that so many things change. All the metrics change. When governments are measuring productivity, they're not measuring like how do you measure productivity of something that's free for you today? That's the point. Look at your phone. Look at all the apps that are free, completely free. It was only I think eight years ago that CNBC put a post on why the self driving car would never work. Because the lidar on it, number one, it won't be lidar, it'll be what Tesla is doing. So they missed that. But the lidar on it was $65,000 per unit, so it couldn't scale. Apple's new phone has that same lidar or equivalent lidar. And the bill of Materials is $5. It comes to you for free. And so the whole different industry is being built on top of this digital. So the prices just keep coming down and exponentially more gains. And how does an economist measure that? How do they say because it doesn't show up in GDP because it's free. Right, right, right, right.

[Robert Breedlove]

But it is the biggest contributor to productivity gains.

[Jeff Booth]

Exactly. So they're trying to get us to buy more things, more houses so we can spend more, everything else so we can. When that's becoming less and less of the overall economy.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right. And the measure is clearly broken even as we're proving with a zoom call right now. You and I didn't have to fly somewhere, book a hotel, book a studio, sit down. We're just using digital technology to bend time and space and talk to each other. So both of our productivity has exploded.

[Jeff Booth]

And you should see where this is going. So I'm where this conversation is going. I've seen some of the technology, leading edge technology. A couple of my friends, two different friends are actually running different companies where this conversation, we could have four different people in this conversation and it would feel like we're talking to each other. It's using AI and digitizing ourselves in 3D. And I could whisper something to you and the other four couldn't hear that. It would be like we were sitting beside each other and it's already here. It's just not widely distributed yet. So when you think about what is. I forgot who said it. The futures here, it's not widely distributed. The when you see some of these technologies and what they mean, we're talking zoom and what it's changed. That change eradicates borders yeah, because in B.C. i just was with a bunch of ministers in my province and they're talking about how we're going to protect the jobs and why zoom is such a good thing. Because now we can move some of the jobs to the smaller cities and those people can get employment. But that's not how it'll work. Businesses will hire the best labor, wherever that labor is. So if you can, if you can hire somebody for cheaper, that's a, that's in your case, a state away. That might be the first step. But if it's, if you can remote work and you get really good at remote work, why wouldn't you hire somebody? Why wouldn't you open up your labor market to the world?

[Robert Breedlove]

Right, yeah, of course.

[Jeff Booth]

And so it becomes more and more deflationary and more and more information. And that's just kind of the first step.

[Robert Breedlove]

This is so. And you get into this towards the end of the first chapter, you talk about the foolishness of protectionism in that, you know, it's impossible to keep your exports high while also protecting your private sector from competitive foreign markets. So every country kind of wants their cake and eating it too, and that they want to export a lot to the world, but they don't want their own market participants to have to compete with others in the world. But the digital age is just basically dumped water all over that. Right. There's no more borders.

[Jeff Booth]

It vaporizes the borders. And by the way, bitcoin actually plays into that really well too. Because in a digital world that looks like that you needed a natively digital currency.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Yeah. Because the one piece we didn't have was capital to move over those networks.

[Jeff Booth]

Exactly. That's agreed on by everybody and to value for that value exchange.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. So yeah, it's so interesting.

[Narrator/Host Introduction (Robert Breedlove)]

So we have this.

[Robert Breedlove]

I guess the rising debt in the world is almost where it's a symptom.

[Jeff Booth]

Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Where the decree of trying to, I guess force growth maybe is the right term here they're trying to just use inflation to as an MMT or it's a. Activate idle capital, but just to accomplish government established aims. Which is an aside here. Mises would actually say I learned this in human action. I thought was really interesting. Every government action necessarily wasteful because they are taking pulling factors of production away from the free market, you know, through taxes or whatever means. And they're pointing it towards some politically established agenda that the free market was, was not doing on its own by definition. Otherwise the government wouldn't take action.

[Jeff Booth]

Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

So it's, it's constantly reshuffling our resources towards lower value aims on balance. And so we have that system of decree, I guess colliding with economic reality. And the economic reality is we're innovating and becoming more productive. But the system of decree is dependent on debt and the growth of debt and inflation to discharge the debt over time. So it's like an arms race almost between entrepreneurs globally innovating and central banks trying to keep prices inflating to keep the debt based system sustainable.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, and you bring up some really interesting points. A lot of the people that are most hurt by this are the people that are fighting, they want mmt, they want. And those are the people that are actually most disadvantaged by the system. But if you actually understand their point of view, if you're having a hard time paying for your groceries or paying for your rent or you've lost your job and the non free market government has kept prices really high and you're left out, then you're desperate. You're not exploring the things we're exploring. You're not deep into thought where we can explore a whole bunch of these things and really understand it. You're desperate. You're desperate to feed your family and you'll listen to anybody that says, okay, I'll give you a $2,000 check. You'll vote for them without realizing they gave it to you by picking your other pocket.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's right,

[Jeff Booth]

they took it from you to give it to you. Because the inequality that inflation that is driving the wealth inequality more and more and more is them saying I'm going to divide the pie how I want to divide the pie when you keep on doing that. There is no free market right now and it's way worse than people realize. I'm on a whole bunch of boards and I look at these board projections and I look at how much money is coming from the government into their business and everything else. But that's a first order thing. A lot of those people think everything's great because they're still profitable and everything else without realizing most of its government funding. And then they don't realize most of their customers are only in business because of the government funding too.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right, right, right.

[Jeff Booth]

And so their business would collapse as with all of the, it would just be nominals across, across the board. And so we live in an illusion of that capital being good capital when the free market. And so it's misallocating capital everywhere on that path away from the free market. Essentially that other end of the spectrum is you concentrate all power government. And then government is essentially the biggest thug is in power. And you see other countries that look like that. And that is in the future for the us, Canada, everywhere else along this path.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. It's as if the political structure, I guess it's almost like they're tricking people in a way that they're saying we need more growth, more jobs. Which people think sounds great because everyone's in desperate need of more money because they're being pickpocketed by inflation and other impediments to the free market. So it's an illusion. Right. They're holding out this. Everyone. It's not to say. Yeah, the jobs themselves. Like everyone. Mises talks about. Mises talks about this too. Where institutional unemployment only happens again when government is taking resources from some to point towards another aim. That when they pull resources, this could be with minimum wage. Right. When you set an artificial floor to labor prices that creates unemployment. So it's the government almost shooting itself in the foot for whatever reason. Lack of knowledge

[Jeff Booth]

again. And they could go back to the big thing. What would they do right now? And I actually, I wish I had an answer. There's nothing that can be done. The existing system will fail. And it's spectacularly probably. But what would you do? There is no answer. There's no money there. It's debt. A debt based economy cannot work with technology today because technology is driving prices down. So anything that stops technology from driving prices down concentrates power in people who are printing money.

[Robert Breedlove]

Centralizing.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, centralizing that is everything along that axis. And what they missed. So could this have gone on for a lot longer? And why didn't we see it? Why did. What, why didn't, why did my book kind of hit that nerve and people are starting to see it lit a match and everybody. So but why didn't we see it? Because we measure everything from the existing system. We don't know how fast technology is moving. And if you. So now that you see it, you can't unsee it. You see it everywhere. And, and so, and it's this, this idea is connected to everything. So a lot of times we, we, we might move. Me too. We might move too fast to Bitcoin because we've already gone down the rabbit hole and understand what it looks like. And you'll notice in the book that's actually why I left. It's a paragraph at the end instead of the whole thing.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

And, and, and because once you accept the fact that technology is deflationary and you realize we're just starting on that and it's more and more deflationary. Then instead of defending that, because that is true, it's a fact, what we should ask is how does any system that requires inflation not centralize all control and the power of a very few.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

Because that's the other side of this. Right? So how does any system that blocks that benefit of technology essentially driving abundance to society, how is any system that stops that not concentrating all control?

[Robert Breedlove]

Right? Because by definition, the free market is distributing the fruits of that labor. As we become more productive, everyone's prices are decreasing, freeing everyone, everyone's time to innovate and produce more savings and move on. But when you block that, you're whoever's blocking it, the power accretes to them.

[Jeff Booth]

Totally.

[Robert Breedlove]

Totally.

[Jeff Booth]

And it's why today billionaires are increasing the rate of the inequality, how much wealth they've gained during this crisis. And then, and then taxes will go up to say, oh, we're going to tax them a little bit to give to these people because we created artificially high prices over here to save them in the first place. So that's why there's nothing that can be done for the existing system to cope with how fast technology has changed the rules.

[Robert Breedlove]

The other thing that we touched on, but maybe it's worth fleshing out a bit, is that the actual creation of this debt is self annihilating in the long run because it's actually constraining future growth. Say it's pulling it forward, but it's at the cost of later sacrifice. You have to service that debt and so it's pulling down growth and productivity while at the same time increasing the service cost of debt, which is interest. And when those two things cross, it's like you're in a debt jubilee situation. It just has to blow up. I mean, what goes on most kind of thing.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah, but debt jubilee, there will be no debt jubilee, right?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, I would say, agreed, there has to be. I would just say default implicit or explicit.

[Jeff Booth]

That's, that's a better, better way. So they're trying, this is already a default and they're trying to implement, implicitly do that through inflation. The difference. But when every country is trying to do the exact same thing, it just feeds the machine faster and faster and misallocates capital faster and faster. So that's why I said there is no way out of the existing system. And when I actually wrote the book, I was, I had already been an investor in Bitcoin, but, but I was actually wide open to other possibilities other than Bitcoin that could you have a conversation that could change this fast enough. And, and I've come to the conclusion that no, it's too. In fact Covid accelerated everything accelerated technology on one side and it accelerated the response to technology on the other side. And so we have such a magnitude of problem that's all over the world. People think it's just in the US The China growth story is the China debt story. There's never been a country in history that's created debt to GDP faster than China. Look at the numbers right now versus if you think the Fed's printing, look at China and imagine this. Let's see, I'll use Africa for as an example, the digital. Forget digital and we'll talk about that later. But let's say what you want. I get to print money out of nothing and I can lend it to people and get paid back money. So I'm going to go in to Africa and I'm going to Belt and Road and drive Africa and I've just got them paying me back money that I'm creating out of nothing. And so it sounds like a pretty good deal. And so every country is playing the same game and it runs into geopolitical fights as well.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, currency wars, trade wars to real wars. Not only is the I guess the fiat currency complex self annihilating in the long run, but it's also driving the

[Jeff Booth]

divisiveness among countries geopolitically and populations within countries within countries.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, because it's weaponized money. It's being used to reallocate wealth from some and give to others. It's all about who those others are. That's what people are contending over. Is it the rich, is it the poor, is it the middle class, whatever. But at the end of the day it's an economic paradigm premised on plunder. We have to steal from someone or somewhere to try and paper over these other losses and it just doesn't work. You know, it's incredible and I guess so to maybe lead us into the next topic here. It's the digital age or information technology. It now information travels seamlessly worldwide. And it's because it does, it is actually eradicating wasteful effort from the system. Now some of that wasteful effort, by the way to your point in your book are jobs. People don't like the sound of that. But it's like this is the nature of innovation is all of a sudden you're one day you're a custom shoemaker and you know, whatever. 1700, Italy. And the next day, a factory moves in next door, and you and all your custom shoemakers are out of business because the factory does things exponentially better. But in the long run, and for the balance on population, that's a net benefit to humanity. We're now creating shoes faster per man hour than we were with a custom job. And that might be kind of a bad example if you're talking. If you get an equality or whatever, but you get the point. Innovation advances us, but in the transitions, people are disrupted, people are displaced, people lose jobs. So it's as if maybe politicians have really seized onto that. And it's happened historically, too, to try and push back on innovation. And, you know, we need to tax the rich. We need to do this. And I don't know that that strategy works as well in a digital age where, you know, a California politician tweets adversely at Elon Musk. A few months later, he's in Texas. So is that what's happening?

[Jeff Booth]

Is it.

[Narrator/Host Introduction (Robert Breedlove)]

We're just.

[Robert Breedlove]

Everything has become digitized. So now governments have lost the attack surface that they're accustomed to exploiting.

[Jeff Booth]

And I think because one of the things, when you lead down some of those questions, it makes it look like governments or this evil corporation and everything else doing things to. And there's a whole bunch of people that believe that. I don't. There's bad people. There's. There's. There's bad actors, there's mostly good actors trying to do that don't really know what they're. They. They don't know that they're in a sea change. There's good actors and bad actors in Bitcoin. There's. There in any system you'll have. And even good and bad itself is what. What does that mean? Right from a. So I just think the system and the system design has a response that is pretty logical to follow. And because of one of the things I'm looking forward to exploring on this, and I don't know how far we'll get into it, but exploring and actually having others take the conversation even further is it's really hard to let go of the branch of a monkey holding onto a branch without another branch to go to. It's really hard to leave a system that you believe in with a glimmer of something that looks really scary on the other side. So people are staying in the system. And so in bitcoin in general, we could do a lot more to paint the picture of what the transition looks like. And why this is so much better. In fact, Robert, it's one of the things, actually, I was excited about talking with you because this is something I think you do. So this is something you do. And there's a bunch of others that do that as well. That isn't just about money. It's about what does this mean for humanity on the way through. And so. But yeah, again, the system, again, not bad actors, there are some. But if we keep asking, how do you run this system without concentrating all power and removing the free market in its entirety, tell me how you do that, then they need to provide a response to how they do that. And the more that they have to provide a response, defending the action, the more you'll see. Wait, in bitcoin, the thing that they're fighting against is the thing that saves them.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right? And history bears this out. Right. We've seen civilizational collapse almost inevitably is presaged by currency debasement or collapse manipulation of the other protocols. By the way, it could be property rights, could be whatever. Once people start playing with the rules, there's no sound basis on which to build a strategy to conduct your life. Civilization falls apart. And I agree with you and your book makes this point, and this is one area I think we agree very strongly, is that it's a flaw in thinking or flaw in your mental model to try and look at the individual, to try and be like, oh, Trump is the problem, or is the problem like people and their Personas, in my opinion, are emergent properties almost of system design or of incentives. Right, this is the classic Munger.

[Jeff Booth]

Exactly.

[Robert Breedlove]

Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. So it doesn't matter the individual. You can. The other way I say this is we can't look at who's sitting in the seat. We have to look at the seat. What is the seat? What handles what levers are available to that particular command center, if you will. And that is what. I guess the big promise of bitcoin is that it's a game without lovers, without political lovers, necessarily, necessarily. It's just a fair playing field where no one can change the rules. So it is distinctly different, but clearly very scary for a lot of people. And frankly, it's normal. Novelty induces sort of the double response of either hopefulness or fear. And it is incumbent upon us, I think, people that have done the exploration to try and depict it as honestly as we can, and I think we both agree that bitcoin is a net positive overall. This is a real. I'll shift Gears a little bit here, but it's very direct.

[Jeff Booth]

Before you do, I want to pick up on something you said because it ties to. So you mentioned that essentially all currencies collapse at some point out of the very same thing. And you look out through history and you see this. And Stephanie Kelton and entire monetary theorists and everything else don't believe that's true, but the evidence says otherwise. I remember going back and forth on Twitter with Stephanie on this specific incident, and she used the British pound and how long that's been currency. And then you see responses from Twitter, how much purchasing power lost over the. Over the time. And that's all true, too. But that's actually the. That's the small part of the argument. The bigger part of the argument is this. Actually, there was research out this week that by Atsa Patnik that the British Empire, Britain essentially took $45 trillion from India or between 1720 and 1935, or 1780 and 1935 over a couple hundred

[Robert Breedlove]

years

[Jeff Booth]

through essentially a game of tax and paying two people that was really the same person. So they took out $45 trillion out of India. You could agree with the research or not, but the question is, could the pound have survived that long without the $45 trillion of additional stimulus that gave them that? And what gave them that? It was the war machine that allowed them to do that. And, oh, no, we're colonizing, we're helping. And so would that pound survive? Would have survived that long, or would it have survived if Britain didn't win the war, World War II winners. And you can see in even some of the examples that are used by MMT proponents and everything else, that on balance, there's no chance they would have survived. They would have failed like every other one. If you bring in the additional data that made them survive for longer.

[Robert Breedlove]

And they were all.

[Jeff Booth]

I asked Stephanie on. Okay, so to tell me how this one survives without war, then? Because it can't.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[Jeff Booth]

Because the rules have to be reset. The rules are always reset through war. And so if we think that that can't look through history, it always happens through war. And then you reset the rules. We promise we won't do it this time.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, right. But if the promise is breakable, history proves that it's always broken.

[Jeff Booth]

It's always broken.

[Robert Breedlove]

And I think, too, that the British pound was on a gold standard while India remained on a silver standard for some time. Right. So there's another game being played there. They're holding a lot of money, and it's Yeah. I would say maybe one of the most comprehensive descriptions of human history is people fighting over the ability to control the money.

[Jeff Booth]

Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Even when you go to war and you conquer another country, you're doing that to either seize their assets, raw materials, or.

[Jeff Booth]

Yeah.

[Robert Breedlove]

Or to seek tribute payments.

[Jeff Booth]

Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

You're gonna lean on them to pay you forever. And again, this is. Points towards the importance of something like a Bitcoin, where you actually have a money that can't be confiscated. Would not be worth fighting over so much. And it just. One of the ways I put this in my writing was that the stability of rules is the bedrock of peace. So if you can imagine even a simple game like the game of Monopoly, if the rules are fluid, you're gonna constantly. That's the first thing you're gonna fight to control is like who gets to control the fluidity of those rules? Who gets to make the rules? Because whoever gets to make the rules never loses effectively, they become the game.

[Jeff Booth]

They become the game master.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's what countries have been doing throughout history.

[Jeff Booth]

Monopoly, though, is a really good example from. It blew up. But I actually said this. The Canadian government as well, I used the same example. But if you think about the game board of Monopoly and if you think about it as playing two players and one player lands on all the properties and the other player lands on go to jail or there's utility and then they don't basket and they go back to jail or something like that, then the system design, what that would say is luck and timing gave one player an advantage early. And. And, and that system reinforces on itself and it keeps reinforcing on itself. And that luck and timing, that luck and timing emerges and now that person's collecting more and more rents and the other person. And the other person is actually hurt by the exact same thing. It's actually getting harder and harder to win the game to a point that they can't. They go around the game board and. And the game's over. Yeah. So if you think about the existing system we live in today from what's happening in real time right now. That's what's happening in real time right now. Because of luck in timing. People were there first. They have their assets of houses, stocks, everything else. And those stocks are going higher and higher in price. And not because they should, because government is making them go higher and higher in price.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[Jeff Booth]

And there's a whole bunch of groups that are disadvantaged, young people, a whole bunch of ethnic groups all over the world that are disadvantaged by this, by the same thing, minorities. And so one person's winning, the other person is losing at a rate that's increasing faster and faster because of manipulation of money. How long until the people decide? Three different responses. One, I'm going to play a new. Because in the game of Monopoly, the game starts again and you get to have a chance to win in this game. What if the game never ended? What if you couldn't? The game never ended. It just would look like that forever. On the, on the winning side, my assets are all going, this is a great game. I love this game. And you think, you think you're winning. And I know some wealthy people really well that actually believe it's their intellect and how smart they are, why they're winning. And it's not. They're winning because of the rules of being manipulated by money. And all their assets are going up as a response and their business value is going up as a response and everything else. And on the other side of that coin, somebody is losing by the exact same amount. Right. And so it just begs a question, how long will the losers go around the game board that's rigged that they can't win? Right. They will play a new game. Bitcoin is a new game. And a lot of the early people on bitcoin were essentially like, burned down the world, this number, because this game is so rigged over here. They will burn down the world. They will burn the game board to the ground. That's where you get revolutions and wars. But they won't stay in the system or they'll elect leaders or they'll elect leaders that promise them that the game board will be changed with no ability. And those leaders have no ability going back to your actor, different actor in a system or different chair. And those leaders have no ability to change the game board.

[Robert Breedlove]

And something like an MMT is going to be disproportionately targeted at the wealthy. So they want to go and tax the wealthy to redistribute, quote, unquote, some of that wealth to the middle class or the poor. I actually think that would be more of an accelerant to bitcoin than anything else. Because the wealthy, we say luck and timing, but clearly this is all multivariate. There are a lot of really smart people that are wealthy that have played the game well, strategies. They're going to see this shift in the rules once again. And if the government starts coming after their stash to finance and fund mmt, there's only really one safe haven asset in the world that a Government can't touch. I think that would accelerate bitcoin adoption.

[Jeff Booth]

Think about, think about though what the rate of printing is right now and a rate of debt growth and think about taxing all of the companies 100%. 100% of the profits. Not 90%, 100% of the profit. You couldn't make a dent into this problem. There is no way out through taxes. There is no way the existing system. And that's why the government. And so if, if you say taxes go up now, all of this will be, is a smoke show and it will happen. But it'll, it'll, but there's going to be exponentially more printing and the taxes are really a smoke show to say we're doing something about this for, for these, these entities or these people. And, and, and that in itself, if printing keeps going, enriches those people faster. So, so, so, so the point is the existing system has no way out. Yeah, at this point I wish it did. I really, I really wish it did because, because it's bound to hurt a whole bunch of people on the way through.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's a great proxy I'd never heard of before. Actually. Even if you tax the productive economy is just say public equities at 100%. It's not enough to dig your way out of the hole. The other one I heard years ago, which was around 2022, that the interest expense on US government debt would exceed tax revenue, meaning they would actually have to print the interest. They'd have to moneyball the interest. And historically that's stage one of hyperinflation. You just can't get yourself out of that situation. Yeah.

[Jeff Booth]

So if interest rates. So it doesn't look like it today because interest rates are being artificially held low. And so governments think they can take on more and more debt without any cost of that debt. But the interest rate isn't a reasonable proxy of the free market. The interest rate is a proxy of the government printing to keep them, to keep them low. So in other words, when your risk free rate is being manipulated and that's what the bond market is telling us and everything else, and you know it's going to be more and more manipulated, then every other economic calculation is manipulated too. Yeah, every other, every other one. House prices, stock prices, everything else is manipulated as well.

[Robert Breedlove]

I would take that even a step deeper and say the quote unquote risk free rate itself is a manipulation. It's government debt saying here's free yield. We can never default because we can print money. The real risk Free rate in a free market is holding hard money, holding gold. And that's what's going to appreciate in tandem with global productivity. Right. It remains scarce while goods and services become more abundant. So it's amazing how deeply rooted the illusion goes well.

[Jeff Booth]

And that illusion. But it's a very real illusion. Right. It is the price we pay for goods around in our daily lives. That illusion is connected to so many other things and it keeps you on a rat wheel trying to work more and more and more to be able to pay. Because why do we spend so much time working besides the friends we meet and everything else? Really curiosity. But why do we really spend that much time working? Most people it would be so I can get enough money so I can spend my time valuably. Right. Kind of ironically. Right. So I worked for 50 years of my life so that I can retire the last 10 years in relative lifestyle, can travel, I can do everything else. All the while governments are trying to make that equation worse.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Right.

[Jeff Booth]

And keep me working, working, working, working is making less and less in real wages to be able to make the. And destroy the value of my currency which keeps me locked in. I'm a frog boiling in a pot not knowing. Not knowing the system is right. And I keep doing. And then all my friends and everything else who are equally working the crazy hours in the same thing. You're competing. Do you have a. Do you have a. How did you get into a house fast enough? Did you leave her into a house fast enough so you can put enough money for a rainy day when, when, like when you retire? And it's endemic. That economic calculation is broken and it's endemic everywhere else in our lives and we don't see it. We're measuring in a system that is. Is designed to get worse and worse and worse.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[Jeff Booth]

We don't question. We don't even question why we do it at all in the first place.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's the reason I named the show that is what is money is to get people to look at what is looking. Right. The AP is like what we're measuring all these things in dollars. Well, what are dollars? That's what's being violated is the measuring stock not the measured necessarily.